Opening today’s email already got you 1 point. Clicking on stuff you’re interested in gets you 2 points. And then there’s the 3 daily games (if you can crack Mastermind you seriously deserve a medal lol). We’re in talks with a bunch of sponsors for our first YAP Rewards Week which starts 31 March. So now is the perfect time to rack up status points so you’ve got YAP dollars to spend in a few weeks. Check out your dashboard to see how much you've earned so far 👇

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

If you’re a brand, apparently you need not woo influencers anymore. Your new muse (or, shmooze target) according to NYT, are chatbots (which is simultaneously predictable and deeply bleak.) Companies are quickly realising they can no longer simply promote themselves to potential consumers. They must now win over the robots, too. And this means pitching their products and optimising for mentions so that when someone asks "what's the best running shoe," their brand comes up. It makes sense strategically. More and more people are using chatbots to make purchase decisions, bypassing traditional search entirely. The whole dynamic is shifting from parasocial relationships with creators to just trusting whatever an AI tells you. And brands are racing to position themselves as the default answer.

The other half of consumers are in the US are using TikTok as a search engine. People are no longer Googling "how to fix a leaky faucet." They're opening TikTok and typing it into the search bar, trusting that someone has made a video showing exactly what to do. Which I can totally vouch for – I literally did it for a broken zipper the other day. It makes sense. The search is fast, visual, and often more helpful than wading through SEO-optimised blog spam. Google is probably sweating, losing the search war to a platform that was never designed to be a search engine. Between TikTok and AI, the shift is steadily rewriting how people find information.

And finally, the content gods are smiling upon us today: Instagram just opened up content scheduling to all users, a quiet but significant change. Up until now, only business accounts could schedule posts in advance. Now everyone can do it natively within the app. It's a small update that makes Instagram feel more like a professional platform and less like a casual social network (which we know it’s not anymore.) Scheduling is a feature that kind of signals that you're treating your account like a job. And by making it available to everyone, Instagram is basically acknowledging that's how people use it now. No one's just posting spontaneously anymore. Everyone's optimising, planning, thinking about engagement windows and algorithmic favour. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

No, not AI (well, probably still a little) – but 6G. That is right. The standard formally known as 6G is still being established. But that won't stop the industry from getting the hype machine warmed up.

Which is funny, because we've seen this movie before. And the ending was lowkey kind of… sh*t.

We were promised a shiny new world: self-driving cars, remote surgery, smart cities, AR concerts beamed directly to your face, downloads so fast you'd get 100GB while sitting at a red light.

Telecoms blitzed federal officials. Hardware vendors sold billions in infrastructure. Countries literally competed in a "race to 5G" like it was the landing of a new planet and somehow became a matter of national security. The PR was impeccable, mwah, chefs kiss, 10/10 no notes diva.

And then... nothing. Well, not nothing. We got slightly faster internet.

Sometimes. If you're lucky.

And standing in the right spot.

Remote surgery requires reliability 5G can't consistently deliver. Autonomous vehicles rely on GPS and LiDAR, not 5G. Smart cities are still mostly concepts. And the mmWave spectrum that was supposed to enable all this magic turned out to be expensive, limited in range, and easily blocked by buildings, trees, and fkn rain.

Most of us are paying higher phone bills for speeds that aren't dramatically better than 4G. The coverage is still spotty. And the infrastructure costs have been astronomical. So why the heck are telecoms now desperately trying to justify those investments while already pivoting to hype the next thing?

It's a pattern. Tesla promised full self-driving "next year" for nearly a decade. The metaverse was supposed to revolutionise everything and then absolutely carked it. AI was going to replace all jobs immediately until everyone realised it mostly just makes convincing-sounding nonsense.

The formula is always the same: promise a revolutionary future, generate massive hype, secure investment and regulatory favour, deliver incremental improvements, and then start hyping the next thing before people notice the gap between promise and reality.

It’s hard to imagine it will. The industry is already following the same playbook with vague descriptions of transformative applications and absolutely zero acknowledgment that we're still waiting for 5G to deliver on its original vision.

Ericsson's CEO has notably toned down the rhetoric, now calling 6G an "evolution of 5G" rather than a revolutionary leap. Which is... probably more honest? But also feels like quietly admitting that maybe we oversold the last one.

The technology will improve, speeds will gets faster and latency will drop. But will it fundamentally change how we live and work? Will it enable the sci-fi future we're being sold? History suggests, not really.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

One such case was captured in a now-deleted Instagram Reel originally by Murr Arbuckle, who correctly identified the Italian brainrot character Tung Tung Tung Sahur in a quiz (please don't ask me to elaborate):

"Oh! Oh! That's Tung Tung Tung Sahur! That's Tung Tung Tung Sahur! Look, look that's Tung Tung Tung…”

While we may never know why he was so excited to identify an anthropomorphic log wielding a baseball bat (again, don't ask), Arbuckle's shrieks have left quite the impression on TikTokers.

Recently, they've been using his audio to describe times when something finally clicked, like a super niche reference or who that voice actor is in the anime you're watching.

Take this sound and film yourself at 2x speed lip-syncing to the audio. Then, add onscreen text describing a time you made a connection and went absolutely nuts over it.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: Hey at least he got to sit down
❤How wholesome: i heart punch
🎧Soooo tingly: Sand ASMR
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Tandoori Chicken Arayes

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.